Hi NYSteve,

In my experience the Bicycle Bluebook is useless. I've had the website bookmarked for years and it has never been helpful. It's prices skew toward the high end and the models included are woefully incomplete.

I haven't purchased a new bike since the late 1960's. All of the bikes my family has purchased since then have been used. By far, the best source for us in recent years has been eBay. But this only works if you do your "due dilligence". This means you must first educate yourself about the bike model(s) and year(s) that you are considering buying or selling. Often, a review of "completed" auctions is a great source for pricing information. And, second, you must educate yourself how to use eBay safely so as to avoid problems.

It often takes patience. I created a "search" for a 58 cm carbon Team Fuji and saved the search. I configured it so it would email me whenever a new eBay ad was posted that fit my search criteria. It took about 6 months to find the bike that I purchased. But the 2008 Team Fuji that I bought is my favorite road bike today. It was well documented with lots of close-up high-rez photos and was sold by a trustworthy seller who made sure that it was professionally boxed for shipment. It took about 5 months to find a 44 cm carbon Specialized Ruby Elite for my wife. She bought a 2008 model, also. In both cases, there were a lot of bikes to chose from but we waited until the "perfect" sale came along.

Before eBay, buying a used bike was very difficult if you have a particular model in mind (especially if it is rare) and the selection that a buyer had access to was often abysmal. But eBay changed all that. It created the biggest used bicycle market in the world. It also created the biggest bicycle parts market in the world and I've bought and sold many vintage and contemporary parts there. Most of my vintage parts purchases were NOS (new old stock) from bike shops clearing their aging inventory.

When doing research on a model, the BikePedia website can sometimes be helpful. It's been reorganized and the home page is awful now (you have to enter a bike into the search box in the upper right and click on the "Go" button before you see its extensive database of bike models which goes back to 1993. No "complete" bicycle database exists, but BikePedia has been helpful more often then not to learn what the original equipment of a bike was and (sometimes) what its retail price was.

Finally, don't forget the bike manufacturer. Some of them keep an online archive of previous models that stretch back for many years. Both Fuji and Specialized do this (although the Specialized archive is tricky to locate). Like BikePedia, the manufacturer's website won't give you prices for used bikes, but it can provide you with information about what equipment was standard when you are shopping. That way you'll be better able to spot when a used bike no longer has "original" equipment.

Kind regards, David